Over the past several weeks I’ve been working on some content I’m excited to finally share with you through a series of blog posts. This series will introduce you to Windows Phone 8 development from an Android developer’s perspective. Through the course of the series you’ll create your first app. It won’t be anything pretty, but you’ll learn the ins and outs of the development environment, how to create a simple user interface, and how to perform navigation. Along the way you’ll see some Android Hints that will help make it easier for you to transition your existing skills to the Windows Phone platform. You’ll also see some Visual Studio Tips to make you more productive in your development environment. Good luck!

In the last lesson you set up your development environment which included installing Visual Studio. In Visual Studio, you create apps for Windows Phone by creating a Windows Phone project. The Windows Phone project contains all the files that comprise the source code for your app. Visual Studio makes it incredibly easy to start a new project with a set of default files and directories.

ANDROID HINT

The Windows Phone project template in Visual Studio is similar to the Android Application Project template that is added to Eclipse when you install the ADT Plugin.

In this lesson you’ll learn how to create your first Windows Phone project.

For the sake of this walkthrough you’ll be using a combination of XAML and C# to create your first Windows Phone app. XAML (eXtensible Application Markup Language) is nothing more than a declarative language used to create the UI for Windows Phone apps. If you’ve done any Android UI development you’ll be very comfortable with XAML as it is simply an xml file. Just to be clear you are not limited to XAML and C# for your apps. You could use a combination of XAML and Visual Basic, XAML and Visual C++, or HTML and JavaScript to create your app.

Your Windows Phone project is now set up with some default files and you’re ready to being building your app. In the next lesson you’ll spend some time exploring the project you just created.